by David Lodge
Henry no longer ‘took’ Punch – he hadn’t for years – and relied on seeing it at his club or in the houses of friends. He was shown the cartoon by Edward Warren, when he dined with him and his pretty wife Margaret at their little house in Westminster soon after his return from Torquay, and they chuckled over it together before the meal. He liked this couple very much and was godfather to their first child, repeating the baptismal link with which their acquaintance had begun. Warren was doing well in his architectural career, and was also something of an artist. A pencil-and-wash picture of a curious old building, recently executed and displayed on the wall of the sitting room, particularly caught Henry’s eye. The building was of red brick with stone detailing, and had a large handsome bow-fronted window on the first floor, but a humble wooden door at ground level such as one might see on a stable or barn. ‘This is charming,’ he said. ‘What is the building?’
‘It’s the Garden Room of Lamb House, in Rye,’ Warren said. ‘A kind of Georgian gazebo, I suppose one might call it. The house itself is somewhat older, and probably the finest in Rye.’ He and Margaret had spent the summer in a cottage at Playden, just outside Rye, and were full of enthusiasm for this corner of East Sussex. In fact they had written to Henry urging him to come and sample its attractions, but comfortably ensconced in the Osborne he had politely demurred. Now, over dinner, he listened to their enthusiastic description with keener attention, explaining that he would be looking for a place to retreat to during the summer months of next year.
‘Blomfield’s cottage at Playden would be the very thing for you,’ said Warren, and the more he heard about it the more promising it seemed. Reginald Blomfield was a friend of Edward’s and a respected architect. He was building a number of private houses on a site called Point Hill overlooking Rye and the Romney Marshes, and had a summer place of his own there which Edward thought he would be very willing to let Henry rent cheaply in the early summer.
‘And are there roads through the Romney Marshes – where one might ride a bicycle?’ he asked.
‘Absolutely! Flat roads that go on for miles. And charming villages with wonderful old churches to explore.’
‘It sounds like just the place I’m looking for,’ he said, and Warren promised to make enquiries on his behalf.
At the end of the meal Margaret left them at the table to finish the wine while she went to check that her infant was sleeping soundly upstairs. Warren asked him what he was writing, and he told him about The Old Things, which the Atlantic had mercifully agreed to take as a serial, and which he hoped to finish by the end of the year. ‘And will you write any more plays?’ Warren asked. ‘I do hope that beastly experience last January hasn’t put you off.’
He hesitated for a moment to break the vow of secrecy he had imposed on himself as regards Summersoft, but he was relaxed by the good food and wine and the warmth of the hearth fire at his back, and he desperately wanted at least one other person in the world to know that he had been commissioned by Ellen Terry to write a play for her, and had completed the task to her satisfaction. No confidant could be more reliable and discreet than Warren. ‘Well, strictly for your ears only . . .’ he began, and briefly related the history of the play and its prospect of production next year.
Warren was impressed and delighted. ‘That’s wonderful, James! What a splendid riposte to your critics!’
‘It may of course never reach the stage,’ he said. ‘I’ve learned not to rely on theatrical promises.’
‘Even so, this proves that it wasn’t only your friends who admired Guy Domville,’ Warren said. ‘Ellen Terry must have been really impressed when she saw it, in spite of the loutish behaviour of the gallery.’
‘That was indeed – at the time – a small reassuring thought to salvage from the débâcle,’ he admitted.
‘It really was a very good play, you know, Henry,’ Warren said kindly. ‘You should be proud of it.’
He meditated his response to this remark for a moment. ‘It was, shall we say, good in parts,’ he said. ‘Like the curate’s egg.’ It took Warren another moment to place the reference, then he threw back his head and laughed heartily. Henry, pleased by his own witticism, joined in the laughter. It occurred to him later, recalling this convivial moment as he walked home, that if he was able to make a jest at the expense of Guy Domville, then the wound its failure had inflicted on his soul must finally be healed.
5
IN the late spring of the following year, 1896, he moved into the Blomfields’ cottage at Playden, having rented it for three months at a very moderate rate. He was hugely pleased with his situation, which was superior even to the Osborne both scenically and in amenities. The cottage was perched on the edge of Point Hill, a high escarpment which rose abruptly from the level plain of the Romney Marshes and faced the sea a few miles away. From the terrace, where he spent many hours, and dined most evenings due to the uncommonly fine weather, he enjoyed a view that might have been painted by some Italian or Flemish master. To his right the town of Rye, girdled with an ancient wall, conical in outline, and surmounted by its medieval church tower, was reminiscent of the picturesque hill towns in the background of old religious pictures that often drew one’s eye away from the martyrdoms or miracles in the foreground. Immediately below him the River Rother uncoiled itself lazily towards the sea, and to his left the marshes, which were in fact lush fields grazed by sheep and cattle, spread out in a hazy expanse punctuated with clusters of trees and the occasional church steeple. Long ago, in the Middle Ages, when the sea had covered most of this land, Rye had been a flourishing port. But the sea had withdrawn, dykes had been built to prevent its return, and the marshes drained. Rye had been left high and dry, connected to the sea only by a narrow channel, and a similar fate had been suffered by two other Cinque Ports (as they were collectively known), Winchelsea and Old Romney. But the decline of their commercial importance had largely preserved them, and the whole area, from the disfigurements of the Industrial Revolution, making this pocket of southern England a kind of historical-geographical anomaly, a delightful secret known only to its natives and a small confraternity of occasional residents from outside (Ellen Terry, for instance, had a cottage in Winchelsea).
The Blomfield cottage was a modest bungalow, but quite large enough for his needs, and he was well looked after by the local servants. For company he had brought Tosca with him, and a singing canary in a cage, the gift of a female friend. He also brought his bike, and used it to explore the Romney towns and villages in the afternoons. The mornings, as usual, were dedicated to work. He put the finishing touches to The Old Things, which began appearing in the Atlantic in April (it finally amounted to about 75,000 words), and started work on another, shorter serial for the Illustrated London News, called The Other House, based on his unperformed play about the murder of a child by a jealous woman. He had never written for such a popular magazine before, nor had he ever written about murder before. It was the closest thing in his oeuvre, he supposed, to a ‘sensation novel’. But it was well paid, and cost him little effort – he kept closely to the original dramatic structure, and merely expanded it with additional dialogue and some scene-setting descriptions. He was becoming pragmatic, to use one of William’s favourite words, about his writing career. If he couldn’t make money from the theatre, then he must make it where he could.
He enjoyed strolling around Rye – its steep and narrow cobbled streets were unsuitable for cycling – browsing in the bookshops, pricing items in the curiosity shops, lounging on the ramparts of the Ypres Tower, and reading the inscriptions on the gravestones in the churchyard. St Mary’s was a Norman church much added to and restored, with Gothic flying buttresses, an eighteenth-century clock with mechanical moving figures to strike the hour, and a recently installed, rather beautiful window of the Nativity designed by Burne-Jones and fabricated by Morris. From the parapet of its square tower you could see for twenty miles. It stood inside a churchyard studded with ancient graves and hemmed o
n four sides by quaint little clapboard cottages. One day, strolling off this square into West Street, he recognised with a little thrill of pleasure the distinctive shape of the Garden Room that Edward Warren had sketched. It was attached to its parent, Lamb House, at a right angle in the cobbled grass-grown roadway, which descended steeply to the High Street. The architecture of the main house was plainer than the garden extension, but very pleasing to the eye: a solid, honest English gentleman’s residence of mature red brick, with seven sash windows, a handsome canopied front door with a fine brass knocker, and three stone steps down to the pavement. It was an immensely attractive house, and he coveted it instantly. He lingered in the street for some time, and peered impertinently through a ground-floor window, though without being able to glimpse more than a corner of a snug wallpapered parlour. The top of a large mulberry tree visible over the wall between the gazebo and the main house hinted tantalisingly at the existence of a spacious garden. He enquired at the nearest shop, an ironmonger’s, as to whether Lamb House was likely to be available for rent, and received a discouraging reply. It was owned by a Mr Francis Bellingham, a retired banker and former mayor of Rye, who occupied it with his wife and son, and the presumption was that the son would take it over when his parents died. Disappointed, he nevertheless left his name and address with the ironmonger and begged to be informed if the house should unexpectedly become available in the future.
His lease of the cottage on Point Hill ran out at the end of July, and he was unable to extend it, since the Blomfields would be spending the rest of the summer there. He liked the area so much, and was so reluctant to return to London in the dog days, that he looked for another place to rent in Rye, and discovered that a house near the church known as the Old Vicarage was luckily available. It was scruffier than the Blomfields’ cottage, and lacked the latter’s modern plumbing, but it was more spacious, and had a little back garden from which you could see a segment of the same view, and look up at the gulls wheeling and crying overhead. Here he began work on a new story, which showed every sign of growing into a novel, about a little girl called Maisie who became the victim, witness and pawn of her adulterous parents and their respective lovers; the technical feat of presenting a depraved adult world through the eyes of a perceptive but innocent consciousness was proving peculiarly fascinating.
He brought the Smiths down from De Vere Gardens to look after him – and so that he could keep a closer eye on Smith, who had made alarming inroads into his modest cellar in his absence. He suspected that the man was in a permanent state of mild inebriation, but it was difficult to accuse him because he artfully disguised the symptoms under the habitual extravagance of his professional manner, swooping and twirling around the dining table, producing dishes and carafes out of the air like a conjuror, or standing to attention at the sideboard with glazed eyes and impassive countenance while his master and guests consumed their food. A writer called Ford Madox Hueffer, a tall slender young man with centre-parted yellow hair, who was staying with relatives at Winchelsea and had asked to meet him on the strength of an alleged admiration for his work, came to lunch and had been so discomposed by Smith’s idiosyncratic style of serving food, swinging each dish round from behind his back like a discus and arresting it inches from the recipient’s top waistcoat button before lowering it to the table, that Henry had openly reprimanded the man, but it made no difference. Smith’s aloof bearing seemed to convey the message: ‘If you wish to be waited on by an earl’s butler, you must tolerate a degree of eccentricity.’ Hueffer was the grandson of the painter Ford Madox Brown, one of the more respectable members of the Pre-Raphaelite group, whom Du Maurier had brilliantly satirised in Punch in the parodic illustrations and doggerel verse of his ‘Legend of Camelot’. Henry had so relished this piece at the time that he had committed much of it to memory, and he was still able to recite some lines about Rossetti’s women:
‘O Moses what a precious lot,
Of beautiful red hair they’ve got!
How much their upper lips do pout!
How very much their chins stick out!
How dreadful strange they stare! They seem
Half to be dead and half to dream.’
The verses still made him laugh, even if young Hueffer’s amusement was more restrained.
Not long afterwards he received a worrying letter from Du Maurier, who unwisely had gone back to Whitby once again with Emma and the family, exposing himself to its frigid blasts of North Sea air and pitting himself against its unforgiving inclines. His health had evidently suffered in consequence, though he characteristically covered this information with a joke: ‘It’s only when struggling uphill that one realises how fast one is going downhill.’ His old friend and hero, Millais, had died of cancer earlier in August, and he had been invited to be a pall-bearer at the funeral in St Paul’s Cathedral, but he had had to excuse himself and was not even well enough to attend the service. Knowing how devoted Du Maurier had been to Millais, Henry took this to be a grave indication of his state of health. He had finished The Martian at last, but was still working on the illustrations, and thought his good eye would just about see him through this task. Henry replied with sympathetic concern and urged him to moderate his usual rigorous Whitby regime.
The next thing he heard was that, on his return to London in September, Kiki had been told by his doctor that he had overstrained himself by climbing too many steep hills, and was ordered to spend three weeks in bed, to which he had submitted with much reluctance and grumbling. When he next had occasion to run up to London, Henry went to see him in Oxford Square. Outside the house he met Tom Armstrong, Du Maurier’s old chum from ‘Trilby’ days in Paris and now the distinguished head of the College of Art in Kensington. He was bent on the same mission, so they saw the invalid together, sitting on upright chairs beside his bed. Kiki’s appearance was a shock. He was haggard and hollow-cheeked, and seemed thinner than ever in his nightshirt with a shawl round his bony shoulders. He was suffering from several symptoms, trivial individually, but collectively debilitating: acute dyspepsia, infected gums, and a wheezing asthmatic cough, not helped by his insistence on continuing to smoke in spite of the doctor’s advice. ‘Life really isn’t worth living without the occasional smoke, especially when you can’t take solid food,’ he said with a naughty grin, puffing away at one of his hand-rolled cigarettes, and brushing the ash off his blankets in case Emma should see it.
They chatted about the success of Trilby, which had just ended its long run at the Lyceum and set off on another provincial tour preparatory to going to America – it seemed that in spite of having numerous productions of their own the Americans craved to see Tree’s already legendary performance. Henry had seen the play the previous winter, and found it, as he expected, a vulgar but tolerably entertaining version of the novel, with much prurient emphasis on Trilby’s sitting ‘for the altogether’ in the first half, and some lively singing and dancing, notably a cancan in the Christmas party scene in which Gerald flung himself about the stage in his dragoon’s uniform with perspiring abandon. Tree had built up the character of Svengali into a dominating presence – a capering, gloating, eye-rolling, yellow-fanged, greasy-locked villain, who manipulated all the other characters like puppets. Henry remarked that the actor pronounced the name ‘Svengali’ with a long ‘a’, making it sound much more sinister than Du Maurier’s own pronunciation, which rhymed with ‘alley’.
‘Yes,’ said Kiki, ‘and now everybody says “Svenghaali”, like Tree, so I suppose I’ll have to as well. I hardly feel the story belongs to me any more. It’s got out of my control. Did you know there’s now a man’s hat called a Trilby, like the one Dorothea Baird wears in the first act?’
‘Yes, indeed,’ said Tom Armstrong, ‘and selling like hot cakes, I was told in Lock’s.’
‘There’s no such hat in my book, of course,’ Kiki grumbled.
The presence of Armstrong, whom Henry did not know very well, prevented any really intimate personal
conversation, a circumstance which he deeply regretted later, for this proved to be the last occasion when he saw his friend alive. The end came with shocking suddenness a few weeks later – or at least it seemed sudden to Henry, who had been hard at work in the seclusion of the Rye Vicarage. At the beginning of October he and his retinue returned to De Vere Gardens, and he found a note from Emma telling him that Kiki’s condition had worsened. When he enquired what would be a convenient time to see him she wrote back to say that he was really too weak to receive visitors. A new specialist had been called in who had diagnosed an ominous-sounding condition called ‘matter around the heart’. A few days later, Kiki was dead. He was sixty-two.
It seemed that, like Alice, Du Maurier had expressed an unconventional wish to be cremated. Henry learned that his corpse made the same railway journey to Woking, attended by a small party of relatives who brought back the ashes for interment in the churchyard of Hampstead parish church a few days later. In spite of Du Maurier’s well-advertised agnosticism, Canon Ainger had agreed readily to hold a funeral service and presided himself, assisted by two other local clergymen. It was a cool, blowy October day, with leaves drifting down from the trees and carpeting the footpaths. Inside the church the urn containing Du Maurier’s ashes had been placed on a bier at the foot of the chancel steps, covered in wreaths. The pews were packed with mourners: distinguished artists and writers, Punch colleagues, Hampstead neighbours, old friends from the student years in Paris, and, occupying the first two or three rows, the extended Du Maurier family, all in deep mourning apart from Guy, resplendent in his Captain’s dress uniform: the men grave, the women struggling to suppress their tears, and the two grandchildren who were deemed old enough to attend awestruck. It was an emotional occasion. Ainger spoke eloquently about his old friend and walking companion, and some of Du Maurier’s favourite music was played on the organ, Schumann’s ‘Der Nussbaum’ and Schubert’s ‘Serenade’ and ‘Adieu’ – or so it said in the order of service. Henry did not recognise any of the tunes, though he remembered vividly the mild March evening years ago when they had passed beneath an open window in Porchester Square from which issued the sound of a male tenor voice and an accompanying piano, and Kiki had stopped and, lifting his finger, said: ‘Ah, Schubert’s Serenade!’